Lorde’s synaesthesia manifests itself as her seeing sound as colour. Now she has revealed how ‘this record is very intense colour-wise’, with the sounds very closely linked to the ‘fluorescent world’ of going out at night.

“It’s hard to explain this to people who don’t have synaesthesia because they don’t know any different,” said Lorde. “For a long time I assumed that people had a colour for each day of the week or for all of their friends’ names. Then you just realise, ‘no, you’re just weird – that’s your own name’.

“The work that I do is very much a reflection of the inside of my brain ‘translating the colours in her head’.”

She added: “To experience a piece of music and have this image whirling around you – you know, you pick a chord then all of a sudden there’s this flood of a different colour or a different texture. It’s exciting and it’s strange and it makes everything feel a little bit more vivid.

“There are definitely moments when I just want to listen instead of seeing everything because there are definitely sounds which are overwhelmingly visual with texture and colour. It’s like ‘ah, it’s too much!'”